1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns the generation and presentation of medical examination results that have been acquired with imaging methods, and in particular a method and a user interface to generate and present medical examination results.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Doctors, care personnel and administrators must regularly access various data (for example radiological image series, findings, laboratory reports). In software systems for the recording and presentation of medical data (for example the “Radiological Information System”, “Picture Archiving System”, “Hospital Information System”, “Laboratory Information System”), data are stored in browsers in a simple hierarchical classification and are presented as a tree structure in graphical user interfaces, similar to the case with the graphical user interfaces of many data administration systems.
However, this type of classification is not very flexible since multiple problems can occur in the search for data: the folder structure is unknown, the folder structure does not reflect the preexisting knowledge about the data set, the folder structure was modified (i.e. folders were moved, data was deleted or the like).
The efficiency of the data administration inevitably decreases with increasing complexity of such a data administration, i.e. increase of the number of data sets, increase of the interleaving [nesting] of the data sets, increase of the users accessing the data sets, increase of the data fluctuation. Redundancies can occur, for example when data objects are (accidentally) stored twice.
Moreover, in the search for data the case can occur that data are not recorded in the current system, thus for example the access to laboratory values is rejected. It is also possible that the information that is presented to the user with regard to the desired data set is insufficient in order to locate the data set with justifiable effort.
Therefore, a facet-based classification was proposed in the prior art as an alternative to the conventional structure of the data administration. The concept of facet-based classification assumes the outfitting of every single data object with optimally many relevant properties, what are known as metadata. In contrast to similar metadata-based classification systems such as “tagging” and “folksonomy” (trade names), however, these properties are predefined and are in turn subdivided into hierarchies. The sub-division into continent, country, city, district or into company, department, work area, business division, line of business, department, term can serve as an example. Multiple parameters or hierarchies (“facets”) can be searched for simultaneous, in an arbitrary order and with an arbitrary degree of detail in the search for a data object.
A disadvantage of this approach relative to the known, simple hierarchical folder structure is that the concept is new to the user and is therefore unfamiliar.